How Social Services Can Seize our Children

It is scant solace, but parents whose children have been taken from them by social services on what they consider insufficient grounds now know that they are not the only ones. Over the year since I first described the plight of Emma and Martin, and looked into Essex's child protection and adoption procedures, scarcely a day has gone by without a distraught parent bringing another case to my attention.

These parents cannot understand why seemingly minor or passing problems have become magnified or distorted by social services. Time and again, rather than investigate and observe - or support and rehabilitate - the chosen solution has been to take a child, and often then that child's siblings, into care.

A major factor seems to be the Government's target, set in 2000, for a 40 per cent increase in adoptions. The motive was to take children off the care register but, like many well-meant initiatives, it has had undesirable consequences. The target has encouraged social services departments to achieve Beacon status by arranging the adoption of easy-to-adopt children - young, healthy and white - rather than strive to find permanent homes for older children, or those from ethnic minorities, or those with disabilities.'

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